Jeff Manza reviews three recent books and their takes on the coming (or current) class war so many believe is tearing America apart: Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence: America’s Growing Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It, and Christopher Hayes's Twilight of the Elites: After Meritocracy. Read More
Scholars offer their widely differing takes on the success of charter schools, a "twenty-year experiment" in alternative education systems, largely based in for-profit, inner-city programs. Read More
While the economy is showing signs of slow recovery, foreclosures continue to decimate American cities. Six million families have already lost their homes, and the … Read More
Since the early nineteenth century, social reformers have been concerned with how different groups fare in school. In the early … Read More
The current student debt burden is an unsustainable outcome of the government's abdication of responsibility to secure access to higher education. Andrew Ross analyses the factors behind the funding crisis and suggests some ways to reestablish an affordable education system. Read More
Sociologist Ann Mullen explores what it means that women now earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees. Rather than seeing this as a sign of a “male crisis” in higher education, this article concludes that the gender integration of higher education is far from complete. Read More
Sociologist D. Randall Smith argues that a segment of big-time college sports has embraced the corporate model and this has led to a steady increase in the revenue gap between the "haves" and "have nots." Read More
Monica and Karen, two typical in-state students starting college at a mid-tier public university in the Midwest, encounter organizational arrangements best designed to serve affluent, out-of-state partiers who can afford to pay full freight. Sociologists Laura Hamilton and Elizabeth A. Armstrong discuss how Monica and Karen's stories reveal the great mismatch between the needs of most college students and what many four-year residential universities offer. Read More
In this interview, Pedro Noguera discusses his insights on the state of public and higher education in the United States. He reflects on how inequality, class, and race play a role in hindering the success in education of marginalized populations. Read More
Using data from the General Social Survey, sociologist Thomas J. Linneman shows that conservatives and liberals increasingly differ regarding government action to reduce income inequality. Rich liberals support government action nearly as much as poor liberals, while among rich conservatives there is very little support for government action. Read More
